[Ask Hyojin] What does 짱 mean?

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Welcome to the third lesson in the series, “Hyojin, what does it mean?”.

짱 [jjang] is already a widely-known Korean slang word. It means “best”, “top of top” or “super” in most cases and is used as a noun in sentences like this; “이거 짱이에요”. And it also means “very” or “really” as an adverb in sentences like “짱 멋있어요”. And sometimes it is used together with other short words to form some other interesting expressions such as 얼짱 or 몸짱. You should note, however, that using this word as an adverb as in 짱 멋있어요 might sound a bit out-dated. Instead, young people use other words such as 완전. No one knows for sure exactly where this slang word came from, but in this lesson, we introduce several different theories about the origin of this expression.